io6
The British Colonies.
and the island of Eibat, off the coast of Africa, were bought. Then, in 1854, the Kuriah Muriah Islands were ceded by the Sultan of Muscat. In 1857 Perim was finally occupied by a British force, and in 1868 the peninsula of Little Aden and the island of Sirah were secured by purchase. In 1882 the British bought a tract of land in Arabia, and in 1886 the island of Socotra was placed formally under a British Protectorate. In 1885 we occupied Diego Garcia, an important strategic position in the middle of the Indian Ocean. On the African coast there is the British Protectorate of the seaboard of Somaliland, south of the Gulf of Aden, and on both sides, therefore, of the Strait of Bab-el-mandeb England has strengthened her hold upon the approaches to the Red Sea. In the Mediterranean, the island of Cyprus, taken over in 1878 and administered under the terms of a defensive alliance between England and Turkey, is not exactly a British colony, but a strong post of observation. During the Victorian era, therefore, England has pursued the right policy of a maritime power, and has strengthened by many additions her lines of oceanic communication.
Chapter V.
The Growth of our African Colonies (1837-1897).
In 1620 two officers of the East India Company, Captain Andrew Shillinge and Humphrey Fitzherbert, took possession of Table Bay and the Cape in the name of James I., thinking “to entitle the King’s Majesty thereto by this weak means rather than let it fall for want of prevention into the hands of the Netherlands”; also, by reason of the whale-fisheries there and the